Good work is table stakes. The assumption that quality creates its own distribution is the most common mistake builders make. Distribution is a separate discipline.
The phrase “if you build it, they will come” has killed more projects than bad code.
Someone built a public toilet locator app and got a $300 acquisition offer. This sounds like a joke. It isn't — it's the micro-acquisition market working as intended.
Someone built a public toilet locator app. It found real users. They got a $200 acquisition offer, declined, and got a $300 offer.
The most efficient way to kill a startup is for a big platform to add your core feature as a dropdown option. It happens constantly. There are ways to survive it.
The most efficient way to kill a startup is to become a dropdown.
Some products are genuinely useful and still fail commercially. The problem isn't quality — it's that utility without perceived scarcity doesn't command a price.
Useful isn’t the same as valuable. Or rather: useful doesn’t automatically translate into something people will pay for.
Automation tools with per-task pricing look cheap at the start. They're designed to. The costs come later, when you're dependent and volume has grown.
The most popular automation platform charges per task. That sounds reasonable until you build something that runs 50,000 tasks a month.
Asking people if they like your idea feels like research. It isn't. There's a hierarchy of signals, and most founders stop at the wrong level.
Asking someone if your idea is good practically begs them to lie.
Building a starter kit for an emerging tool and crossing $5K in three weeks isn't luck. It's a pattern. The tool gets the press; the template captures the revenue.
Someone built a starter kit for an open-source AI coding tool and crossed $5K in three weeks.
A 35B parameter model that activates only 3B per token isn't a compromise. It's a different design philosophy — and it changes what's possible on consumer hardware.
A 35 billion parameter model that activates 3 billion parameters per token sounds like a trick. It isn’t.
An investor told a founder their business wasn't venture scale. The founder agreed — and didn't care. That framing shift is worth examining.
An investor told a founder their business wasn’t venture scale. The founder agreed. Then they went home and kept running their profitable business.
The most viral developer tools aren't the most useful ones. They're the most enjoyable to encounter. There's a lesson in that.
The most viral developer tools aren’t the most useful ones.